The theory of natural selection cannot describe how early life evolved, in part because acquired characteristics are passed on through horizontal exchange. It has been proposed that culture, like life, began with the emergence of autopoietic form, thus its evolution too cannot be described by natural selection. The evolution of autopoietic form can be described using a framework referred to as ...

We derive qualitative relationships about the informational relevance of variables in graph­ ical decision models based on a considera­ tion of the topology of the models. Specifi­ cally, we identify dominance relations for the expected value of information on chance vari­ ables in terms of their position and relation­ ships in influence diagrams. The qualitative relationships can be harnessed ...

This paper proposes a partial implementation of an integrated Quality, Security and Environment management system [1] to deal with the definition of an appropriate global management plan. This implementation is based on the multi-objective influence diagrams [12] which are one of the most commonly used graphical decision models for reasoning under uncertainty with multiple objectives.